Starfist: Lazarus Rising (5 page)

The sound of their breathing was the only noise in the compartment other than the soft susurration of circulating air. They were becoming more convinced Schultz was about to start a mutiny.

"Brigadier Wainwright was commander. Gave his Marines squid work, got their minds off the war."

"What? Let me see that." Sergeant Linsman stepped forward and almost snatched the reader out of Schultz's hands, barely catching himself in time for Schultz to hand it to him. He scanned the document on the screen, then flipped back through others that Schultz had marked. He read them again more slowly.

"This is 13th FIST's Unit Diary on the return voyage following the Third Silvasian War," he told his men. "Like Hammer said, Brigadier Sturgeon was a lance corporal with India Company. Thirteenth FIST suffered heavy casualties, nearly as heavy as we did on Kingdom. The Marines were brooding over their losses." He raised his eyes to look at his men and said, "Just like we were yesterday." His men looked at the overhead, the deck, bare patches of bulkhead, anywhere but at him or at each other. "Their morale was suffering and Brigadier Wainwright was afraid the FIST

was going to collapse from it. So he made arrangements with the ship's commander to put his Marines to work, squid-type make-work, to get their minds off it.

"It worked." Linsman handed the reader back to Schultz. "Tomorrow we're going to do more squid work. We can be pissed off at the squids, we can be pissed off at the brigadier, we can bitch about it as much as we want. But we won't request mast.

Is that understood?"

The Marines made faces and muttered unkind things about squids and their commanders, even about Marine squad leaders, but they agreed.

"I know some squids better stop snickering at me or they're going to be eating through straws," Claypoole grumbled.

"Belay that, Rock," Linsman said sharply, but not too sharply.

Claypoole grimaced, but nodded acquiescence.

Word got around to the rest of the Marines about what happened to 13th FIST at the end of the Third Silvasian War. They continued with their squid work for the rest of the voyage. They were pissed off at the squids and at Brigadier Sturgeon, but they stopped brooding and nobody requested mast. A couple of sailors who snickered too openly did wind up eating through straws, though. The Marines'

psyches were well on their way to being healed by the time the
Grandar Bay
reached Thorsfinni's World.

CHAPTER 4

He could feel the cold hardness of a floor beneath where he lay. His ears were ringing and there was a gray haze in front of his eyes, but he knew he must be lying on the ground—and he was naked. But his head was clear of the insistent probing that had filled it since... when? He could not remember! He groaned.
He could hear
himself groaning!

He let the air out of his lungs and took a deep breath. The air was dank and smelled of excrement. Wonderful! Feeling began to come back into his limbs, first his fingers and toes, then his legs and arms—oh, God! His body hurt, it burned and throbbed all over! He groaned again. "Oh, shit," someone croaked. The voice seemed to come from light-years away but it echoed inside his head. He could feel his tongue now. It seemed the consistency of tar paper and filled his mouth. He swallowed and it hurt his throat. "Oh, shit," he groaned.

Someone touched him. "Unnnh," he said.

"Are you alive?" Someone touched him again.

He turned his head painfully in the direction of the voice and saw a woman, or something he knew must have been a woman, but this creature with its hair in filthy strings dangling about its haggard, pale face resembled a... a... He struggled for a word, and the name of a monster sprung into his mind: Medusa. He started in terror at the image.

"You don't look so good yourself," Medusa said. "What's your name?"

"Oh, balls," he groaned.

"Hello to you too, Mr. Balls," Medusa replied.

There were six of them, four men and two women, crammed into an iron cage too small for their number. They lay virtually on top of one another, as if they'd been tossed roughly in there to rot. He scooted into a corner and pulled his legs up under his chin. There were scratches and gashes all over his body, some of them very painful, but the others in the cage with him apparently had fared no better at the hands of their captors. In the crook of each person's arm was a huge black and blue welt where a tube or a syringe had been shoved into the vein.

The cage was placed a few meters inside the entrance to a cave. It was empty and light came in from outside.

"My feet!" one of the men screamed. Balls and Medusa—the other three were still only semiconscious—looked at the man's feet. They were bruised and blistered; shreds of flesh hung off them. "Look at
your
feet!" he exclaimed in horror. Medusa gasped and reached a comforting hand toward her own bleeding feet.

"Jesus Christ!" Balls exclaimed, examining the damage done to his own feet.

"You shouldn't talk that way," the other man said.

"Why not?" Balls asked, unaware he'd said anything.

"Because—Because—you shouldn't. I don't know." The man shrugged. "You just shouldn't." He looked quizzically at Balls, as if
Balls
should tell him why his own language was unacceptable.

"I remember—I remember," Medusa began, scrunching up her eyes as she tried to remember something important. She shook her head in frustration. Her filthy locks swayed obscenely with the motion of her head. Balls could see that once they had been
red
.
Red hair,
now who did he know who had red hair?

"I can't remember!" Balls said, and smacked a palm into his forehead.

"I remember!" Medusa said suddenly, brightly. "I remember carrying things!

Monsters made us carry things! Yes! That's how I hurt my feet!" Her teeth were even and white, except where some had been broken off.

The two men looked at one another. Neither could remember that. "I'll take your word for it," the man she called Balls said at last. He tried, shifting in the narrow confines of the cage, to ease the pain in his feet and thighs, but it was no use, so he flopped back down on his rear with a sigh.

Medusa held out her hand. "My name is—is—" She shook her head again. "My name is—Colleen." She spit the name out hesitantly. "Colleen?" she repeated, as if trying out her name. "My name is Colleen," she said more freely. "I—I don't remember the rest of my name," she added weakly.

"I don't remember my name either," Balls admitted, panic rising inside him, but he took her hand and squeezed it anyway. The other man just shook his head and clasped his arms more tightly about his legs.

"They did something to us, to make us forget," Colleen said.

"I think it's only temporary," Balls said hopefully. He looked at—Colleen—closely. She sat with her legs drawn tightly up to her chin, but he could see the reddish-brown hair down below and something stirred inside him.

Well, I haven't forgotten
that
, he smiled to himself. All beat up and her hair in a mess, Colleen, lately Medusa, wasn't all that bad-looking. He thought: I can count on her. He looked at the other man, about forty or so, pale, shivering, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together. Don't know about that boy, he thought. He decided to call him "Shaky."

Gradually the other three came around. They sat, comparing what memories of their ordeal they could muster among them. The consensus was that they had been taken from somewhere—their former lives—and held prisoner by monsters of some sort, creatures that were able to get inside their minds and probe their thoughts. But none of them had any idea what the monsters wanted or why they did not appear to be around anymore, and if they were gone, whether they would come back again.

None could remember anything of his or her former life, and only one of the other three could remember his name, and only his given name—Chet. Somehow, that made the rest of them feel better.

A cold breeze came in through the cave entrance. "The light's going!" the other woman remarked.

"Has anyone tried to see if we can get out of this goddamned thing?" Balls asked.

Shaky, the one who had objected to his use of words earlier but had remained silent during the discussions, looked sharply at him again. Balls got painfully to his knees and pushed against the bars. A gate swung open suddenly and he pitched out onto the floor with a surprised, "Ooof!" He lay there for a moment, half stunned, then laughed. "Typical military operation!" he said, half to himself, and wondered, Where did that expression come from? Had he been a soldier once?

One of the other men lunged for the cave entrance.

"Hold it!" Balls said from where he lay. "Night's coming on, we don't know where we are, and we won't be able to find out much in the dark."

"But what if the monsters come back?" the other woman asked.

"I don't think they are coming back," Colleen answered, "or they wouldn't have left that gate unlocked, so let's do as he says and stay put until morning. And has anyone noticed, we're naked? And it's getting cold," she added.

"He's right," the man who called himself Chet agreed. "We'll be warm enough if we stay close together. But whatever you do,
don't shut that gate
."

"Mr. ‘Military Operation,’" Colleen said, extending her hand to help him back inside the cage, "Sounds more like you than ‘Mr. Balls.’ I'll snuggle up with you tonight." And she did.

The morning dawned bright and warm. The six prisoners hobbled painfully into the open, the stronger ones helping the weaker. They stood blinking in the morning light. They were inside a small compound that consisted of several temporary huts built of metal. Scattered everywhere was the detritus of a hastily abandoned camp.

Some of the items lying about were obviously pieces of furniture, but most of the stuff had uses none of them could understand. Whatever they were, the previous users did not seem to need them anymore.

The man they were now calling Military Operation looked up at webbing that was strung from tree to tree. "That looks like it can break up infra signatures," he muttered, and wondered why he thought that and how he knew such a thing.

Not far from where they stood was a high, grass-covered ridge. Behind them, a high cliff formed one wall of a small valley.

"I would like to find something to wear," Colleen said to no one in particular. She headed off toward the largest of the huts. Military Operation hobbled off behind her.

The others stood about for a moment before heading for the other buildings, to see what they could find.

"Look here!" the man named Chet called from one of the huts. He was holding up several strips of light metallic material. They had the malleability of tinfoil, but no matter how hard they tried, the strips could not be severed. "This stuff is indestructible," Chet commented. "We can use it to make shoe packs for our feet!

And wrap strips around us for clothes!"

For twenty minutes or more the six busied themselves fashioning shoes and garments of sorts from the strange material. Colleen wrapped a long strip of it around herself like an evening gown. The sunlight reflected brilliantly off her "dress."

Military Operation chuckled. "Look at your feet," he said. The packs she had crafted out of the material made her feet look six times their normal size.

Colleen looked down at her feet and laughed too, then hopped from one foot to the other. "But I can walk in them!"

"Where there's life, there's a chuckle," Chet said, coming up to the pair.

"And now," Military Operation said, "let's walk up to that ridge line and see what we can see."

At first it was difficult walking in the packs, but after a hundred yards the material began to mold itself to them, and those who had wrapped it thickly enough about the bottoms of their feet found walking much easier, although they had to go slowly because the injuries to their feet were still painful.

They slogged through deep, early morning, dew-laden, grasslike ground cover, leaving long trails behind them as they moved up the slope. By the time they reached the top, the lower half of their bodies was soaking wet from the moisture. They stood on the ridge at last, breathing heavily from exhaustion and lack of exercise, and surveyed the lay of the land. Off in the near distance they could clearly make out running water flashing in the sunlight.

"A river!" one of the men exclaimed.

"If we follow the river," Chet said, "it'll lead us to the sea, and where the coast is, there're bound to be settlements of some sort."

Military Operation waded a bit farther into the grass and stopped. "Look here," he called to the others. They came and stood beside him. The grass had been flattened where he was standing, as if someone had lain down in it long enough to crush it flat so it wouldn't spring back up. "Someone was here," he said. He followed a narrow path through the grass. "Here! A trail!" he called back to his companions. It was a meter wide and easy to follow, as if a number of people had passed that way recently. And it led in the opposite direction from the river.

"I'd say we should follow this trail," Military Operation said.

"I say we follow the river," one of the other men replied. "We don't know who made this. It could've been the—the—
things
that held us prisoner. We could just be walking right back into their arms."

"He's right," the other woman said. "At least the river goes somewhere."

Colleen, who had walked down the trail a ways called back to them, "Look here!"

She pointed to a footprint in the fresh earth. "A human footprint. He was wearing shoes!"

"Did anybody notice, we didn't see a path leading up here from the compound,"

Chet volunteered. "So I don't think this path was made by the monsters. And whoever made it came from a different direction than the compound. I think Military Operation is right. Whoever made this trail knew where they were going, and if we find them, we'll be among our own kind at least."

"And that crushed-flat place, maybe that was where they lay in hiding, watching the monsters before they moved on!" Colleen said.